There’s an interesting debate going on in the Evolution and Ecology forum on whether ‘believing in evolution’ is compatible with believing in God. This isn’t such a surprising topic – those who don’t subscribe to a magazine like New Scientist would be amazed just how much religion gets mentioned in it. But I’d like to ask a subtly different question.
It has been traditional to draw the line between science and religion by saying that science deals with what’s measurable and investigable, while religion deals with the imponderables like ‘does God exist’ – the sort of question that both Dawkins-esque antis and earnest religious pros get in a mess over when they attempt any type of scientific proof.
My question is this. Should other questions that regularly appear in science but are equally (at the moment) incapable of being answered by any scientific test equally be consigned to theologians?
How about:- What happened before the big bang?
- Are we in a quantum multiverse where every decision action splinters off a new version of the universe?
And even
- Is string theory valid?
(Some may not have a problem with the last one, but several notable scientists have suggested that string theory/M-theory is ‘not even wrong’ in its level of untestableness.)
In the best manner of someone on the borderline between science and religion, I have no intention of attempting to answer these questions here, but I think the meta-question (are totally non-investigatable scientific hypotheses really science?) is worth thinking about. Of course at some point, the science may emerge to make them answerable, but for the moment they are as insubstantial and fluffy as Newton’s conception of how gravity worked.
Brian, I think this is a very interesting question to ponder. I’m wondering, though, if there lies beneath your question (whether presently unanswerable questions in science should also lie within the purview of theologians) an implicit assumption – one that seems to be fairly widespread – that theology is merely a speculative activity, one to be engaged in when our scientific endeavors reach their limits. I’m not sure that most theologians would characterize their activity in these terms.
It would appear that, to determine whether theologians have any expertise in answering such questions as the ones you posed, one needs to know what theologians are actually attempting to do, what sources are authoritative for them, whether their explanations operate at the same epistemic level as scientific explanations etc. Uncertainty as to the methods of theology seems to me to cause much of the disagreement in the science and religion discussion.
Just because we think that a question is not scientifically answerable does not ever mean that theologians are capable of tackling it.